Remembering The Summer Of `61

February 02, 1986|By Gary Brichetto.

It was an exciting finish to a good football game. Down by six points with only 20 seconds to play. A touchdown meant a victory and a trip to the playoffs. They scored, the clock ran out and an announcer came on to say that baseball player Roger Maris died. Of cancer. At age 51.

And I remembered the summer of 1961.

Mantle and Maris. The M & M boys. What a season they gave us!

It was rare that anyone made a really serious run at Babe Ruth`s record. Maybe one in every 10 years. But here were two guys on the same team doing it at the same time.

They were the talk of the sports world. Which would be the one to break the record? Would they both do it? Neither? Everything they did that summer was news. The sports pages gave us daily running totals of their numbers. There were radio and television interviews, feature stories and magazine articles telling us everything about them, their lives, histories, how they spent their days off and what they ate for breakfast.

I remember their picture on the cover of Life magazine, their big, muscular arms and their baggy uniforms, holding their bats on their shoulders. Mickey Mantle was on the left, with his round face and Oklahoma grin, while

``the other guy,`` Maris, with the angular features and slight, shy smile, stood on the right.

They were even supposed to star in a movie together. ``Safe at Home``

would be its title.

Then the news changed. Mantle got hurt. And out came the stories of how Roger Maris` life had become a nightmare. He couldn`t eat. Couldn`t sleep.

At the end of the 154th game of that 1961 season, Roger Maris had hit only 59 home runs. One short of the record. A huge picture of Babe Ruth ran in a newspaper under the headline ``Still the Champ.`` But the season had been lengthened since 1927, when Babe Ruth set the record that couldn`t be broken, and Roger Maris had an ``extra`` eight games to hit two more home runs. He did. And his name did get into the record book, only to give a whole new meaning to the word ``asterisk.``

And they never made the movie.

I was 10 years old in 1961. I hadn`t yet learned about things like jealousy or resentment, age or sickness, life or death. I only knew that every day of that summer I could open the sports pages and be caught in the magic of two baseball players and those great and wonderful things they did that set their world so far apart from mine. And I would dream.

A year from now, or even a week from now, I won`t remember which team won that football game by one point. But I will remember the day that Roger Maris died.

And how his name in the news had made a 10-year-old boy very happy. And a 34-year-old boy very sad.